Janel Was Here

Media 204 - Illustrator

I had a little bit of Illustrator already in Media 110. The part I had most fun with was making Spirographs. I've always loved Spirograph designs. The class didn't mention it, but as soon as I started playing with Illustrator that's the first thing I thought of.

Here's a scan of some real ones I made on paper many years ago with the 50's Spirograph set:

Here's the one I made last year with Illustrator in Media 110:

But it took hours and was done the hard way because I didn't know Illustrator's tools very well yet! I fiddled and tweaked with it for like ever to get it right. I should say, the outermost shape was hard. Illustrator can make the smaller copies instantly.

In my dedicated Illustrator class I started right in fiddling with spirographs again.

These two designs took minutes to make. They're just ovals copied and rotated by degrees. Illustrator has a keyboard shortcut to rotate copies around a specified point. Slick!

By the end of the class I was starting to know what I was doing. Here's my masterpiece. Spirographs
the smart way!

And this time I made note of how I did it so I can't forget.
I know these look pretty simple. Maybe one of these times I'll make some fancier ones to mimic the ones in the scan, right now I'm happy just knowing I could. Having the problem in a 'solved' state is satisfying. I can make
vector spirograph designs in Illustrator now.